A personal exploration of Wiccan spirituality

Summers and me…no.

I just took a minute to review my posting history at 366. You know, it’s pretty much every summer that something happens and my life derails. Going to grad school, my grandfather dying, my parents’ marriage falling apart, my mother losing her job and having to move…it all happens somewhere in the summer. And now the summer of 2011 can enter its ranks as the Summer My Health Crapped Out. I spent most of August bed bound or stoned out of my mind on pain killers, thanks to the combination of falling down the stairs and killing my tailbone at the beginning of June, then sitting and laying weird for several months to alleviate the pain. That, combined with a more sedentary lifestyle from reading for my tests set off some crazy sciatica, which was the bulk of the severe August pain. Then I come back to Eugene in September, and my eye blows up thanks to me cleaning up rodent feces.

Believe it or not, this picture is actually flattering.

It was awful. I flew back to Eugene on the 1st, cleaned up on the 2nd, spent pretty much all of the 3rd in bed, exhausted and achy. I woke up on the fourth and noticed the inner corner of my right eye looked a little swollen, sort of like I had the start of a deep pimple. By the sixth, it was looking really ugly and definitely NOT pimple like, so I went to the Eugene Urgent Care. There I was put on a prescription for 500 mg of cephalexin, four times a day and an admonition to come back in two days if the infection wasn’t clearing.

It didn’t. So I went back on the 8th, where they gave me an IV of clindamycin and a new prescription: 300 mg of clindamycin three times daily, and an admonition to go to the ER if the infection didn’t start clearing in two days. By the 11th, the infection was so much worse. I could barely see when I looked down, my lower eye had swollen so much, and the infection was beginning to spread into the upper lid. The ER gave me an IV of vancomycin and an oral prescription 800-160 Bactrim DS twice daily. A couple days later, I was back in the ER. The infection had gone all around my eye. I could barely open it, it hurt to move the eyeball up, and I’d gotten a couple skin tears in the inner corner where the infection started.

I was admitted into the hospital for two days, where I received a lot of rounds of IV vancomycin (every 8 hours) and ceftriaxone (every 12 hours). It was miserable. I had to have a CT scan to make sure the infection hadn’t gotten behind or in the eye (if it had, I would have become a surgical patient). They had to measure my urine and fecal output. I was also under quarantine since I had basically been having diarrhea since I began antibiotics and they thought I might also have C. diff (Clostridium difficile) and could potentially infect the whole floor. (Of course, my C. diff test came back negative). They also insisted on giving me a couple injections of enoxaparin to avoid blood clots from sitting around the hospital. The second hurt so bad (and gave me the worst bruise of all my many needles) that I refused any more. On top of all this medicine, Hartwood Grove also did some powerful healing magic for me at the esbat I missed since I was in the hospital.

Thankfully, though, the IVs and magic began to turn things around. Within 12 hours of admission, the swelling had started to go down, and I looked amazingly better by the time I was released. I was put on a prescription for 750 mg levofloxacin once a day for 14 days, and I finished it a couple days ago. My eye looks much, much better now. I’m still sporting a mad dark circle, and the skin tears haven’t fully healed. I’ll probably have a couple scars from them, which saddens me because I really liked my eyes before all this happened, and makeup only goes so far when scars are involved. The biggest post-infection problem, though, was short term memory loss. I think that it was caused by the vancomycin, which is super hard on your veins. I acted like I was high out of my mind for several days after hospitalization, and it really wasn’t until the last few days of the levofloxacin that I began to feel like myself again.

Alas, I fell down the stairs again yesterday (not a bad fall! My arms took the brunt of it!), and now my back is starting to feel sore again.

I’m not even going to go into how much stress this is causing me in terms of my reading schedule, which was effectively blown the entire month of September between the discomfort of reading and the memory problems. They moved my first round of tests to mid November…but I’m still super petrified.

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About the Project

I'm Melissa Zupan. This blog began in 2008 as a record of my attempt to work through Timothy Roderick's book, "Wicca: A Year and a Day." Since then I joined up with a merry coven of Gardnerian witches and became an initiate in 2013.
The blog is now a fuller record of my life and work in Wicca. Right now, there's no main theme. I just write what I want to write.

Read 366 Chronologically

Start with the first post, then keep clicking on the next blog entry link at the bottom right corner of each subsequent post.